The Twelve Caesars (36 page)

Vitellius was the emperor defeated by Rome. A proactive governor of Lower Germany, he won over to his cause the disaffected legions of two provinces within less than two months; Suetonius
describes them as welcoming him with hands upraised as if in thanks to heaven. Invested with ultimate power in the capital, he was unable to maintain either momentum or resolve. Earlier, in 60, he
had served as proconsul of Africa with ‘exceptional integrity for two successive years’; in the discharge of the Roman priesthoods awarded to him by Nero in the same period, he stooped
to theft and deceit. We may never know if those generals who placed Vitellius on the throne subsequently
wondered at their choice. Examination of the emperor’s former
record would have removed their grounds for surprise. As it happened, it hardly mattered. Awaiting Vespasian’s victory, no serious alternative candidate for the purple suggested himself. In
the two months that elapsed between Vitellius’ confirmation as emperor by the senate at Ticinum (modern Pavia) and his arrival in Rome, the city had no leader and no real government. That no
ambitious adventurer snatched the opportunity to step into the breach and usurp Vitellius’ unclaimed throne tells us much about the crisis in Rome’s affairs.

In a technique with which we are now familiar, Suetonius offers us alternative accounts of Vitellius’ family history: on the one hand, ancient nobility gilded by
association with a goddess of the countryside; hard-nosed, low-level self-seeking on the other. Whatever the truth, Vitellius’ own career combined both impulses. His history, particularly at
Nero’s court, was one of grasping sycophancy, but as emperor he was capable of clemency and modesty towards his opponents and he had earlier shown himself a gifted provincial administrator
able to assess and respond to the needs of situations outside his ken. Prior to Vespasian, one lesson of this tumultuous year was the inadequacy of imperial proconsulships as an apprenticeship for
the throne: like Vitellius, Galba and Otho had both served with distinction abroad.

If Suetonius is reliable, Aulus Vitellius, born in
AD
15, inherited as much from the uncle whose name he shared as from his father. That Aulus Vitellius, one of four sons
of the equestrian Publius Vitellius of Nuceria – ‘whether of ancient stock or of parents and forefathers in whom he could take no pride,
unquestionably... a
steward of Augustus’ – inclined to luxury and died during his consulship in 32, when his impressionable nephew was seventeen. This uncle was ‘especially notorious for the
magnificence of his feasts’. Of his three brothers, only Lucius Vitellius, father of the future emperor, maintained a course approaching credit, though Suetonius darkens his memory with
accusations of overweening obsequiousness towards Gaius – whom he worshipped openly as a living god, the first in Rome to do so – and Claudius, whose wives and freedmen he cultivated
with shameless fawning. (He resorted to carrying about with him like a talisman a shoe belonging to the empress Messalina, which he concealed beneath his toga and occasionally, when observed,
withdrew and kissed.) Such cloying fulsomeness earned dividends. A notably successful governor of Syria, Lucius Vitellius added to the triple consulship and censorship stewardship of the Empire
while Claudius was absent from Rome on his expedition to Britain in 43 – access to power that was unusual during this period for a senator outside the imperial family. It exposed his two
sons, both of them future consuls, to the innermost workings of the state. We cannot know to what extent, if any, that experience inspired future ambitions, nor do we read of the reaction of
Vitellius’ mother Sestilia to her husband’s proximity to Claudius’ government. Tacitus casts Sestilia as an old-fashioned matron worthy of the Republic, serious and righteous.
(Her reaction to her son’s principate is one of despondency rather than delight.) Perhaps those were the very qualities which drove her husband into the arms of that freedwoman whose spittle,
Suetonius tells us, Lucius Vitellius mixed with honey and rubbed on his throat and his jaws as medicine.

Such a close association with the former regime may explain why Vitellius felt able to rule without adopting ‘Augustus’ or
‘Caesar’ as elements of
his official nomenclature: under the circumstances, such verbal links were superfluous. It may also account for the apparently limited efforts he would ultimately make to justify his position as
princeps
. In instituting sacrifices to Nero’s memory at an altar on the Campus Martius, he both reiterated his Julio-Claudian credentials and sought to enfranchise remaining Neronian
sympathizers (among whom he counted himself and could certainly have numbered those German legions who, responsible for his own premiership, had hailed Galba only under duress and never acclaimed
Otho); he also retained Nero’s coinage (and that of Galba and Otho) and resisted confiscating gifts bestowed by his predecessors. Deliberately or otherwise, Vitellius played a double game,
simultaneously declaring his own loyalties and placing himself in a continuum of imperial rulers of Rome that did not distinguish between Julio-Claudians and more recent incumbents. Over the course
of the following decade, Vespasian's and Titus’ efforts to capitalize on their connections with Claudius and Britannicus respectively show that the political climate in Rome had not changed
to the extent that Augustus’ family could be lightly overlooked. What appeared like moderation may have been a miscall on Vitellius’ part.

For an audience which accepted the view that character was immutable and fixed from earliest infancy, Suetonius’ portrait of Vitellius includes speaking details. Such were the
(unspecified) predictions of the horoscope produced by astrologers at his birth that his father determined to prevent any award of a province to his son, while his mother apparently ‘mourned
over him as lost’ after his dispatch by Galba to Lower Germany and subsequent acclamation as emperor. Those predictions presumably touched upon that ‘cruelty’ later asserted by
the sources, which Suetonius instances in the period
before Vitellius’ elevation in an unpleasant anecdote concerning his first marriage. Vitellius had a son by his
wife Petronia. Blind in one eye, Petronianus was rumoured to have been poisoned by his father, possibly to prevent him from inheriting Petronia’s fortune (which, we assume, Vitellius wanted
for himself). Suetonius reports this crime as hearsay. The future
princeps
’ own explanation was that, discovered in a plan to kill Vitellius and seized by guilt, Petronianus himself
swallowed the poison he had mixed. We must make up our own minds. It is true that Vitellius would later express concern about the fates of his wife and children in the event of his abdication. But
it is also true, as we have seen, that the sources preserve accusations of matricide and attest to a prodigal’s need for money matched by a lack of scruple in obtaining it: he is reported as
embezzling the public revenues of Sinuessa and Formiae and instituting wholly deceitful legal proceedings when a creditor pressed him too hard for repayment.

On 1 January 69 the legions of Lower Germany refused to swear loyalty to Galba. One day later, German legionary commander and Neronian loyalist Fabius Valens hailed Vitellius as
princeps.
On 3 January, the legions mutinied in Upper Germany too, making cause with their neighbours. It was the first of two legionary revolutions that month. The second, which took place in Rome on 15
January and won the senate’s acknowledgement, made Otho emperor. To the latter’s colours rallied the legions of the Danube and Illyricum and those in the East; Vitellius was the
unanimous choice of Western armies, including Britain. In Tacitus’ account, the craving for empire lay not with Vitellius but with Valens, who ‘stirred [Vitellius’] sluggish
nature to covetousness rather than to hope’.
⁹
It may also have been Valens, in partnership with his Upper German counterpart Aulus Caecina Alienus, ‘a handsome young man of towering
stature
and boundless ambition’ with whom he was otherwise out of sympathy, who strengthened Vitellius’ resolve against that barrage of missives dispatched from
Rome by Otho, offering the former payment and sweet words in return for renouncing his claim to the throne. Whatever Vitellius’ frame of mind, neither Valens nor Caecina was predisposed to
compromise. Both smarted under supposed slights from Galba – the former because of Galba’s failure to recognize in any concrete form his role in killing Fonteius Capito, the latter
thanks to a prosecution brought by Galba against his embezzlement of public money during a quaestorship in Baetica. Like opportunists before and since, Caecina ‘[concealed] his private wounds
among the misfortunes of the state’ and departed the Rhine for Rome at the head of his legion.
¹⁰
Valens mobilized at the same time: his route, through Gaul, was longer and slower. This
disposition of troops left Vitellius himself with the task of recruiting additional men for his rump army, at the head of which he also in time departed the legionary camps bent on combat with the
Othonians. Valens’ and Caecina’s men regrouped in northern Italy outside Bedriacum, where Otho made his fateful decision to engage in premature battle. We know already the outcome. It
was over long before Vitellius arrived.

Victory, however, was qualified, at one level no more than defeatism on Otho’s part. Suetonius presents Vitellius’ emergence as Rome’s ruler with ambivalence, recording those
portents which decreed from the outset a short span for his principate: equestrian statues of the new emperor which, not yet complete, ‘on a sudden all collapsed with broken legs’, and
Vitellius’ own laurel crown which tumbled into a gully. As with Otho, the omens were against the ninth Caesar. Undeterred, he ordered the execution of a number of soldiers who had assisted
Otho’s murder of Galba, but resisted large-scale reprisals.
Those he spared included Otho’s brother Salvius Titianus, a high-profile instance of clemency. His
advance through Gaul took on the festal aspect of a triumphal progress, an affair of civic banquets, elegant boat trips, public spectacles and soldiers behaving badly. Private hosts were bankrupted
in their attempts to satiate his jaded and intemperate appetite, and Tacitus recalls the Adriatic and Tyrrhenian Seas humming with vehicles hurrying to supply his every whim.
¹¹
The governor of
Lugdunensis, a rich man of good family called Junius Blaesus, even lent the threadbare Vitellius clothes fitting his new station. It may have been a high point of this swinish reign. In Rome, news
of Otho’s defeat and Vitellius’ victory, announced in the theatre, was greeted with applause but no outbreaks of disorder. Afraid any longer to express partisanship, a fear shared by
the senate, the people responded to this latest change of regime with a passionless demonstration of what was expected of them. In time, they would learn something of that contempt which Tacitus
attributes to Vitellius’ own troops, inspired by the emperor’s flabbiness of mind and body, his lethargy and indolence, and his slovenliness in the matter of military as well as
personal discipline.

All that lay in the future on the hot July day when Vitellius made his entry into the capital. If the omens foretold disaster and wiser counsellors harboured misgivings, Vitellius himself
exulted in a moment of personal glory. At the head of 60,000 troops, attended in Tacitus’ version by a damning collection of ‘actors, flocks of eunuchs and every other characteristic
feature of Nero’s court’, he had planned his arrival in the garb of a conquering general, mounted, sword-toting, driving before him senators and people alike. Sounder minds prevailed:
the emperor was made aware of the injudiciousness of presenting himself to the people of Rome as the conqueror of his fellow
Romans. He wore civilian clothes and processed on
foot. Those members of the senate who had travelled with him since the accession audience at Ticinum followed in his wake. None was under any illusion. Tacitus claims that the senate had already
‘passed votes of praise and gratitude to the troops from Germany’ for their role in Vitellius’ victory, a powerful statement of its own debasement;
¹²
while Vitellius, in accepting
the name Germanicus, which he in turn conferred upon his son, announced himself not as conqueror of the Rhine, the name’s former meaning, but as the appointee of the German legions. It was an
invitation to factionalism and short-sighted at a moment when the government of Rome desperately needed consensus and strong guidance independent of the demands of any single self-interest.
¹³
In the
evening, celebration took the only form Vitellius understood: a dinner organized by his brother at which 2,000 of the choicest fishes and a colossal 7,000 birds were served. Suetonius condemned
such excess as ‘notorious’.

With hindsight the biographer’s censoriousness adds little to our understanding. Even as Vitellius enjoyed that orgy of fin and feather, enemy forces were mobilizing. In Judaea, Vespasian
had withheld the oath of loyalty. It was a sign. On 1 July, as the Vitellian convoy carved its uproarious passage through the country north of Rome, Tiberius Julius Alexander, prefect of Egypt,
declared his legions’ support not for Vitellius but for Vespasian. Two days later, Syria and Judaea followed suit. The armies of the East, once loyal to Otho, disdained his successor,
preferring instead a commander of their own. Such, at any rate, is the argument afterwards propounded by Flavian propaganda, in which Vespasian is borne aloft on wings of popular support. It would
be naïve to overlook the probability of top-level coordination. Vitellius retained as city prefect Vespasian’s brother Flavius Sabinus. It was a gesture from which he failed
to benefit. Once Flavian victory was assured, Sabinus would attempt to negotiate for Vitellius a peaceful handover of power.